Bill Schneider hits on what is frustrating me about American politics at the moment. We’re basically locked in state in which, barring some confluence of unexpected events, the Democrats will win presidential elections and continue to fail to win control of the House of Representatives. The Senate was designed to march to its own drum, and that is what it will do. In November, the Democrats have almost no chance of winning seats in the Senate regardless of what they do, while in 2016, the Republicans will be slaughtered in the Senate elections for two reasons. First, it’s a presidential election year, which means that there will high Democratic turnout. Second, the Republicans did very well in 2010, so they have a lot of seats in competitive states to defend. In other words, everything seems baked in the cake, and I feel powerless to do anything but play around on the margins.
The margins are important, but it’s hard to get excited about protecting Senate seats rather than picking them up. It’s hard to get pumped up to cut the House Republicans’ advantage from 32 down to 10. We want to win something and change something, but it doesn’t seem like there is anything we can do to change the basic political environment.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try, but my head could be in a better place.
This feeling of helplessness is informing my thoughts on the 2016 election and what I think about how progressives should position themselves. The trouble is, I can’t really reconcile myself to what my head is telling me, which is that Hillary Clinton has an inexplicably broad ideological appeal and that she could break this impasse and carry a supermajority in the Senate and control of the House along with her.
The word ‘could’ is very important here. If she could guarantee that she would pull off the troika, then we’d obviously be nuts not to support her candidacy. But she has already failed in spectacular fashion once. And supporting her candidacy will come at a steep price for progressives, who would otherwise have much to say about the future of the party.
And then there is her foreign policy judgment, which should not be trusted and explains almost entirely why she is not already the president.
It’s just hard for me to accept that we might have to wait until 2022 to be able to end this divided government, and I keep trying not to succumb to the siren call of Hillary’s campaign because I really do feel like she is the only person who could expedite the process.
And that doesn’t just frustrate me. It makes me depressed.
